


a madness most discreet

by cywscross



Series: TW Soulmates AUs [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Drabble, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Platonic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Violence, mentions of captivity, mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-02
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-20 21:14:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3665259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cywscross/pseuds/cywscross
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe they're a little too codependent these days, but they wouldn't have it any other way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a madness most discreet

**Author's Note:**

> Just something I wrote up in like an hour.

 

People never seem to understand the concept of platonic soulmates. Or at the very least, nobody Stiles knows seems to understand the concept of platonic soulmates.

They see him curled up against Peter’s side on a park bench on a sunny afternoon, each reading a book or speaking in low tones only loud enough for the two of them to hear, and they immediately wrinkle their noses or turn away with a roll of their eyes and a mutter of “ew”, as if the mere sight of them screams WE’RE FUCKING. If it’s the nosier assholes in the Pack, they don’t leave until Stiles and Peter get fed up and take off first.

Or, if both Stiles and Peter spend the night at the loft after a late research session, and Peter automatically pulls Stiles into the same guestroom so they can sleep in the same bed, Derek will scowl like it’s the end of the world and glower threateningly at his uncle with Alpha eyes, and Scott will look utterly revolted and try to interfere by not-so-subtly inviting Stiles to bunk with him for the night in one of the other rooms with two beds despite the fact that Allison will also be in there, and Stiles so does not need or want to hear that shit. The two may keep it to kissing and giggling and other fluffy crap before falling asleep wrapped up in each other but it would still be irritating all the same.

Even Stiles’ dad gets this pained look on his face whenever Peter swings by for a visit, and the Sheriff walks in on them cuddling in bed and marathoning movies on Stiles’ laptop with a side of curly fries, and the man thinks he’s pretty clever when he orders Stiles to keep his door open, like that’s what prevents the two of them from having sex.

Nobody ever _hears_ when Stiles tells them that there is no sex involved. Only comfort and companionship and touch from someone _safe_ and _trusted_ and _maybepossiblyundeniablyloved_.

They start spending more time over at Peter’s apartment when the Sheriff interrupts one too many times.

 _“Bad dreams?”_ Peter asks when Stiles calls him at three in the morning on one of the increasingly rare nights that they don’t sleep together, but it isn’t really a question because Peter can read him like a book these days, just like Stiles can read Peter, and he can already here the soft jangle of keys on the other end as the werewolf heads out the door.

Peter’s climbing in through the window fifteen minutes later, all lethal grace and feline silence. Stiles lifts the blankets for him, and the werewolf shucks his coat and jeans before sliding in and pulling Stiles close.

“I missed you,” Stiles murmurs into Peter’s collarbone where a crescent moon the colour of topaz bisected by a shooting star that shimmers an amber-gold is forever imprinted.

Peter hums with something that borders on amusement but doesn't quite reach it. “I just saw you this morning, dear heart.”

But his arms tighten around Stiles in contrast, and one hand sneaks under Stiles’ shirt to rest against the mark etched over Stiles’ heart that matches his own.

They fall asleep like that, twined together without an inch left to breathe between them, and when they jolt awake to the Sheriff’s blatant throat-clearing and obnoxiously loud knocking, Peter is halfway wolfed out and Stiles has one hand palming the gun under his pillow before either of them realizes what’s going on.

Stiles moves out and into Peter’s apartment not three weeks later. His dad is not happy, but then, his dad was not the one who spent three months in captivity at the hands of a coven of vampires with Stiles.

Three months as pets, as entertainment, as _livestock_.

A werewolf’s blood tastes better than a human’s. A Spark’s blood tastes better than anything.

The kicker – Stiles and Peter had to free themselves, biding their time until the vampires finally lowered their guard, and seizing their chance the moment it presented itself to them.

They left nothing but blood and ash in their wake.

They haven’t told anyone exactly what happened, only that they were captured by vampires and evidently imprisoned instead of slaughtered or Bitten, but if they haven’t realized at least a little of what it means to be kept alive for so long by _vampires_ , then Stiles isn’t going to waste time enlightening them with the details.

Peter simply doesn't care. He doesn't care about a lot of things these days, only Stiles. It doesn’t matter to him whether the Pack was incompetent or ignorant or just no match for the vampires in every way during those three months; the fact that they never came to save either of them is unforgiveable in Peter’s eyes.

Stiles can’t blame him. In his own darker moments, when he thinks back to those endless days and nights chained up in a cage for monsters to use him as they pleased, the bitterness wells up his throat and burns his tongue like acid, and those are the times when he wants nothing more than to make the whole world pay.

Nobody gets it. Before they were captured, Stiles was still circling Peter with a doubt and wariness that – while lessened over time – still persisted in spite of the werewolf’s best – but admittedly creepy – efforts. They were soulmates – they knew that from the moment they met in that hospital corridor oh so long ago – but there was a wall between them constructed of fire and madness that neither of them quite knew how to break down. The Pack was relieved by this; the Sheriff too, even though he never said anything. Stiles didn't like it, and Peter liked it even less if his occasionally frustrated expressions were anything to go by, but some soulmates just weren’t meant to be, as ironic as that sounded.

And then the vampires happened, and all Stiles had was Peter, and all Peter had was Stiles, in that unending nightmare of blood and abuse and cruelty.

Perhaps it was shared trauma that pushed them together, forced them to depend on each other, but there’s no taking it back now, no taking Peter away anymore, and Stiles will kill anyone who tries.

Maybe the Pack sees that much in Stiles’ eyes, especially when the two of them first stumbled home, wild-eyed and covered in dried blood that clung to the tattered remains of their clothes, smelling of smoke and death and exhaustion, and never straying more than a foot from each other, snarling at anyone who tried to touch either of them.

The lesson was driven home only after Stiles drove a knife through Deaton’s hand when the vet/druid attempted to sedate Peter so that the werewolf would stop glaring chilly promises of death at anyone who attempted to separate him from Stiles, if only to check them both over.

They’re better these days, at least. They can go out in public without constant physical contact, though they don’t like it much, and it’s always easier to breathe when they aren’t surrounded on all sides.

And they stay out of pack business for the most part, only lending a hand with research when the latest Big Bad is so bad that even Peter can’t ignore it. The first time this happened, when neither Peter nor Stiles would offer their assistance when Scott and Derek approached them, Lydia sought Stiles out and begged, face mottled with a bruise from her run-in with a crazy hunter from a family older than the Argents that even Chris Argent disapproved of.

But for the most part, they live their own lives separate from people Stiles used to call friends and Peter used to call allies. It isn’t quite hate, but the Pack doesn't understand, and Stiles doesn’t care enough to try and make them.

“We could leave,” Peter suggests after a particularly trying day. The Sheriff clapped Stiles on the shoulder on his way to the car to get to work, a see-you-later that was just a bit too close to the neck, and Stiles was in the throes of a panic attack before his dad could lunge for a phone to call Peter after several fruitless seconds of trying to calm Stiles down.

Stiles still blacked out before Peter arrived, but when he woke up, at least he was bundled in bed again with his soulmate lying next to him.

“Just take off,” The werewolf continues. “Go anywhere. Get away from all this.”

Stiles just smiles back wanly. “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to.”

Peter says no more on the subject, only shifting Stiles so that he’s sprawled on top of the werewolf instead, and that's how they spend the rest of the afternoon.

Two months later, the Pack needs the blood of a born Beta wolf to undo the effects of a witch’s accidental but still very much harmful handiwork, Derek volunteers his uncle without actually telling his uncle, working in tandem with the others to lure Peter to the loft with the excuse that Stiles needs him for more in-depth research, and Peter goes ballistic the moment he notices the collective Pack’s shifty-eyed looks in conjunction with the glint of a knife in his peripheral vision.

He tears into his thrice-damned nephew ( _once for the fire, another for abandoning him to a packless, crippled existence, and once more for this betrayal; Peter thinks that even his ever-disapproving sister who always found fault in him but rarely ever her children would be ashamed_ _of the man her son has become_ ), sinking claws into the Alpha’s abdomen right before Stiles bursts in through the door, magic crackling around him with a rage so cold that it burns.

He slams three werewolves into the ground hard enough to break bones without ever even laying a finger on them, and Peter throws Derek straight into one of the support beams with enough strength behind it that it collapses under the Alpha’s weight, and then Stiles is whisking both of them out of there and into his jeep and straight back to their shared apartment.

Peter spends the rest of the day prowling the length and width of their den with unsheathed claws and electric blue eyes, checking for threats in every shadowed corner, checking on Stiles, checking the entrances and exits, checking on Stiles again.

“Do you still want to leave?” Stiles enquires once Peter settles enough to sit still and allow Stiles to coax some food into him.

Peter stares at him with haunted, tired eyes, fork in one hand, Stiles’ wrist in the other. “You said you didn’t want to.”

Stiles shrugs, fingers absently tracing the soulmate mark engraved on Peter’s skin. “I said we wouldn't be able to get away. I didn't say we couldn't try.”

In response, Peter drops the fork, gathers Stiles into his lap, and buries his face in the crook of the boy’s neck, a hand pressed against Stiles’ chest, directly over the mark, every thump-thump a reason to live.

Three days later, when the Pack assembles in front of Stiles and Peter’s apartment to ask for a blood sacrifice this time, they find the place empty and deserted, with only the witch’s decapitated head on the dining table to greet them.

None of them hear from Stiles or Peter again until years later when whispers reach Beacon Hills of a Spark and his wolf, a nomadic pair specializing in the supernatural that Codeless hunters and malicious creatures alike very swiftly learn to fear.

You’ll never see one without the other, and they become the stuff of legends.

 

**Author's Note:**

> **Please leave a review on your way out.**


End file.
